Focus

How and Why Iraq Is Teaching a Lesson to the World – And to the Church

Muslim intellectual Khaled Fouad Allam explains. Islam and democracy can go together, and this is becoming a reality in Iraq. But there are skeptics at the Vatican

by Sandro Magister

ROMA, October 31, 2005 – “L’Osservatore Romano” carried the news of the popular approval of Iraq’s new constitution, giving it the headline on the front page of the October 26 edition. And at the beginning of the article it placed a brief note in a bold font, which usually means that the secretariat of state controlled the text.

Although it displays the iciness with which it usually treats events in Iraq, the newspaper of the Holy See defines the result of the referendum as “a step forward in the difficult and laborious political process in Iraq.” And it continues:

“In the face of the strategy of terror, which knows no truce, there is an ever greater urgency for adequate political solutions – which should be adopted harmoniously both within Iraq and in the international context – capable of assuring serenity and stability for the country. In this sense the approval of the new constitution seems to be a good sign, a premise for further progress along the road toward a real democracy.”

On the same day, the Vatican nuncio in Iraq, archbishop Fernando Filoni, also commented on the result of the referendum. He was interviewed by the agency “Asia News” from Amman, where he was visiting.

The nuncio first of all asserted that the great participation of the Iraqi citizens in the vote was “a positive fact in itself, a sign of the people’s desire to rebuild and begin again.” He lamented the fact that the new constitution “contains some striking contradictions: on the one hand, the hope is to make it a model for the Middle East, but on the other, it has some traditionalist elements.” But he added that the next government “will have at least four months to improve some of its features, and this provides an opening for resolving contentious issues that otherwise would be more problematic and violent.”

The main contradiction in the new constitutional charter, which has even been denounced by various Iraqi Catholic bishops, is between articles 2.1 (b) and 2.2, which defend religious liberty and rights, and article 2.1 (a), which establishes that “it is prohibited to approve a law that contradicts the rules of Islam.”

Furthermore, nuncio Filoni lamented the dropping off of the international community’s attention to Iraq: “This is a result of a lack of information. When the means of social communication are in place, it is easier to sustain the interest and emotion of the international community. The kidnapping of journalists is what has produced this blackout. As soon as the lamp oil – information – ran out, the world’s interest was also extinguished.”

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But more than a lack of information, what explains the drop in attention toward Iraq is an inability to understand the novelty of the events and to analyze them in a new way.

This, at least, is the assessment of an important Muslim commentator, Khaled Fouad Allam. Algerian by birth, he is an Italian citizen and a professor of Islamic studies at the universities of Trieste and Urbino. He is highly respected in the Vatican (but less listened to than respected).

Allam argued his case in a commentary carried by the most popular progressive Italian daily newspaper, “la Repubblica,” where he is an editorialist.

In his commentary – reproduced below – Allam does not refer explicitly to the Vatican or the Catholic Church. But he criticizes the foundation of the paradigms for interpreting events in Iraq that are repeatedly invoked in European politics and culture, particularly on the left. And it is well known that the prevalent outlook on the Iraqi question in Catholic circles and even among the Vatican authorities is to a large extent the same as that of the European left.

The majority of the heads of the Vatican are not only opposed to the armed “exporting” of democracy to the Arab-Islamic countries. Some of them are even skeptical about the very compatibility of Islam and democracy.

The Catholic community in Iraq is also divided. Iraqi Christians went to vote on the new constitution in broken order, with some groups on the side of the “no” vote. Some of them are afraid that a theocratic regime might be imposed.

But for Allam, what is taking place in the Arab-Islamic world, with Iraq as the epicenter, is an epochal change toward openness to liberty. In regard to this, “a new way of seeing things is necessary” on everyone’s part, including the Church.

From an Iraq opening itself to democracy – Allam writes – there comes “a lesson for the entire world, and especially for those who in the last three years have expressed nothing but doubt over the questions of our age: democracy and the Arab world, democracy and Islam, the exportation of democracy.”

Here is his commentary, which appeared in “la Repubblica” on October 26, 2005:

It may be exported, but at least it‘s democracy

by Khaled Fouad Allam

Every time terrorism breaks back into the news after a period of silence, it seems that it is capable of reversing the course of history. But in the terrible struggle between terrorist activity and the inevitable unfolding of history, it is the latter that wins. In Iraq’s case, this means that the Iraqis have no alternative to negotiations among the various ethnical-confessional groups, because Saddam Hussein will never return, and the chapter of Arab nationalism is coming to an end.

A few months ago, in connection with the elections in Iraq on January 30, the leader of the main party of the Italian left, Piero Fassino, clearly and courageously affirmed that on that occasion the real democrats were the Iraqi people who, by challenging terrorism, obliged Westerners to make a different appraisal of what was happening in that part of the Arab world.

The voting was repeated in Iraq throughout the year, with ever-increasing participation, as if that people had decided to teach a lesson not only to terrorism, but to the entire world, and especially to those who in the last three years have expressed nothing but doubt over the questions of our age: democracy and the Arab world, democracy and Islam, the exportation of democracy.

European public opinion is divided between those who justified the act of war as a means of exporting democracy and those who contested the American action.

In Italy, the spirit of the national constitution, which in article 11 repudiates war as a means for resolving conflict; the strong imprint of the Catholic sensibility, which opposes to any war the ideal of nonviolence; and above all the culturalist ideology underlying much of the European approach to the Arab world and Islam are all elements which have influenced the stance taken toward the Iraqi question.

Almost three years after the beginning of the war, a new way of looking at the Middle East and the Arab world is necessary.

Today, whether one likes it or not, that world is changing, because the war in Iraq inaugurated what has been called “the American moment,” and it has brought to light the absence of any European political project on the great questions that are found across those societies.

Of course, this is the case of an “imperial democratization,” which is weighed down by some obvious errors: the unmaking of the structure of Iraqi society through the total dismantling of the old apparatus of the state connected to the Ba’ath party; a communitarian perception of the nation, according to which the “building policy” has begun from the presupposition of a society divided along ethnic and confessional lines.

But on second glance, these are errors that Europe probably would have incurred as well.

They are errors that Europe made in Iraq in 1921, with the British repression of the Shiite rebellion, because even back then the Shiites were already claiming rights to political participation. French and British colonialism always backed the Sunnis, because they had been the country’s élite for centuries, although they constituted a minority. And Arab nationalism perpetuated the situation.

But now all of that is gone, or is dying off, definitively. And it must be understood that the reversal underway will produce a large-scale effect in the Middle East and in the Arab world in general.

The pressure exerted on Syria by the United States has already obtained the abandoning of the Syrian protectorate over Lebanon. And this must not be separated from what has happened in Iraq. Both events are the product of a new phase of history, the slow decomposition of political authoritarianism in the Middle East.

And if in the past it was France that educated and trained the élite of the Arab world – like, for example, Michel Afflak, one of the founders of the Ba’ath party, who received his degree from the Sorbonne – today the new Arab élites prefer to study at Stanford or Princeton rather than Paris.

This does not at all signify the end of a European tradition, of a European form of oversight over the Arab world. But politics must help lead to a reinvestment in the historical dimension that Europeans have lost.

Europe must change the way it looks at the Arab and Islamic world, making political plans, laying the foundations for a partnership that will no longer be the offspring of a dialectic between dominator and dominated, but the product of a new history.

Italy in particular needs the Arab world, and the Arab world needs Italy. Just as Spain created an historically decisive relationship with Latin America, Italy – located in the middle of the Mediterranean, at the confluence of the Islam of the Balkans and Afro-Arabic Islam – is almost obligated to define an Arab policy, a policy in relation to Islam.

While American “imperial democracy” has brusquely inaugurated a new era for the peoples of the Middle East, the left must foster an authentic way of looking at the civil societies of the Arab world, keeping in mind that these are not the same as the countries of Eastern Europe. Lebanon is not Ukraine, and the Arab world, oppressed by authoritarian dictatorships and regimes for over fifty years – and before then by the colonial regimes – has not had its Solzhenitsyn, it has not had its Gulag Archipelago, it has not been able to denounce to the world the barbarities it has suffered.

Of course, in the Arab world there was no system of concentration camps like in the Soviet Union. But many have personally paid the price of denouncing the absence of liberty. It must also be emphasized that Europe has rarely listened to the dissenting voices from that world, the voices crying out about the lack of freedom.

Of course, the question of the legitimacy of an act of war is being posed, and will always be posed. But that question does not freeze history; history continues forward. History is something too serious for one to be able to resolve it through a debate in which the favorable and contrary voices are balanced. The request by Hariri’s son to have the assassins of the former Lebanese prime minister judged by an international tribunal is a manifestation of a history that is changing. And even though Saddam Hussein’s trial is controversial, it will have a strongly cathartic effect on the collective Arab imagination. It will mean the restitution to the Iraqi people of their own history. For this reason, I maintain that it is important that the trial be conducted in Arabic.

Taking all this into consideration leads to the conclusion that democracy is not a luxury for some privileged peoples, and that the geopolitics of the Middle East is definitively leaving behind its configuration in the zones of influence that ensnared it during the twentieth century.

This means thinking up new ways of relating to the Arab world, and a new approach to Islam. In this perspective, the question of Turkey is of fundamental importance, because this also leads toward the overturning of all the previous perspectives. If it enters the European Union, Turkey’s will not be a history apart, but part of a history, the history of Europe.

A few days after the fall of the Iraqi regime, on April 10, 2003, the following was written in an editorial in the Moroccan newspaper “Bayane al-Yum.”

“If true democracy does not arrive from the outside, with the tanks, that means that all those who are called upon by the lesson of democracy must open their eyes and set down themselves the foundations of democracy, and equip their countries with the power of rights and laws and with the values of liberty that are indispensable for all countries and all peoples.”

For me, there are a few images of this new Euro-Arabic way of looking at things: the palace of Alhambra in Granada, the Zisa in Palermo. These must no longer be symbols of a decayed world, but of a Europe that is reconnecting with its own history, because these, too, are symbols of Europe.

The two most recent books by Khaled Fouad Allam are “L’islam globale [Global Islam]” and “Lettera a un kamikaze [Letter to a Suicide Bomber],” published in Italy by Rizzoli. The first of these has also been translated in Germany.

On this website, one of his commentaries on the Christian roots of the European continent is of great interest:

In commenting on the speech Benedict XVI made to the representatives of the Muslim community in Cologne on August 20, 2005, Allam said to the newspaper of the Italian bishops’ conference, “Avvenire”:

“Benedict XVI's words are a big, healthy jolt for us Muslims. At a moment in which the wicked teachers seem to be raging within our communities, his words are an encouragement to bring forth true educators, who exist and are active, but who are not able to make their voices heard as they really need to be. The pope is right when he says that there can be no room for apathy and neglect. We need the courage to denounce and isolate those who use inflammatory speech and incite violence by using the name of God.”

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In the Vatican, the most explicit profession of skepticism in relation to the compatibility of Islam and democracy is found in the editorial in “La Civiltà Cattolica” for February 7, 2004, published with the imprimatur of the secretariat of state.

It not only condemned “the pretext of wanting to export Western democracy to them” as “particularly offensive to the Muslim community,” but it also specified that according to Islam, “takes the sovereignty away from Allah and transfers it to the people, which for a Muslim believer is an act of impiety.”